Basically, I am in total agreement, although w.r.t.

Problem 2: ‘Changing the World’ Creates Black and White Thinking

Actually, I think human beings can't help being drawn to black and white thinking of one kind or another. Even while thinking this, an insidious something in my mind is trying to turn it into some kind of black and white thinking: There are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and people who don't.

So I suggest you have the causation backwards, and rather, the reason so many heated arguments fall into some dichotomy between two Schelling points (like "Change the World" <--> "Stop the catastrophe caused by the maniacs trying to change the world") is a tendency so central to our being that we can't ever expect to extinguish it -- we can only learn to be vigilant about it, laugh at ourselves (and others).

At bottom, I think it is something like an instinct for orienting oneself, like "my people" vs "those I'd better beware of", which to me seems right for hunter-gatherers, who are very likely to only know of two groups (or they can easily view it this way): the people I live my life with, cooperate with, who are mostly likely to defend me in some way, vs those other people who don't think, talk, or decorate their bodies in the proper way, who have neutral at best, and frequently hostile intentions towards me and my people.

Ask yourself (ozziegooen) whether it's happened to you to some extent. Was there, in the feelings that motivated you to post, an element of anticipation of the agreement of people you'd like to get to know better, and simultaneous head-shaking over all those silly people to whom "Change the world" seems meaningful? There certainly was for me while reading it.

Smell is interesting because it's way overrepresented genetically. Something like 5% of most animals' genomes are just a whole bunch of olfactory receptor genes, each for a different individual smell. So it should be unusually easy to do epigenetics with it. Just say "Express the gene for cherry smell more" and then the mice have a stronger reaction to it.

This doesn't mean that any more complex behaviors can be inherited epigenetically. In fact, it might be that nothing else is as suitable to epigenetic transmission as olfaction.

My own personal experience in the Netherlands did not show one specific bias, but rather multiple groups within the same university with different convictions. There was a group of people/professors who insisted that people were rational and markets efficient, and then there was the 'people are crazy and the world is mad' crowd. I actually really liked that people held these discussions, made it much more interesting and reduced bias overall I think.

In terms of social issues, I never noticed much discussion about this. People were usually pretty open and tolerant to any ideas, if it wasn't too extreme. The exception was during the debating club where any and all rhetorical tricks were considered okay.

I do remember some instances where professors were fired/persecuted for professing the "wrong" beliefs, but that was a while ago now. For example, my uncle was not allowed to say that Jewish people were more likely to have diabetes and that medical students should take this into account. Also, there was a scientist who was hounded in the media for 40 years because he said that crime had a large genetic component, until recently when people suddenly went "oops looks like he was right after all, how about that".

I'm extremely intellectually compulsive if I do say so perhaps immodestly

To break a little bad news, calling yourself "intellectually compulsive" really isn't complimenting yourself.

The Official Ideology is that a concern for the truth is an overriding value, quite like how purity and obeying God are overriding values to the religious. In the Official Ideology, what everyone professes to believe, there is a certain status given to zealots for Truth, just as there is a certain status given to zealots for God.

Stripped of the ideology, ideas are a means to accomplishing things in the world. Indulging in a compulsion to tidy them up regardless of any intent or plan to use them is intellectual OCD, mental masturbation, or both, depending on the precise drive/reward structure of the compulsion.

Well, here I am, still interacting with you. Maybe my kung fu is being beaten, maybe not

Well, as you yourself say, you're kind of intellectually compulsive, so that you have the diligence of the zealot, and wouldn't be one of the less diligent who stop when their arguments stop winning, or the even less diligent, who just don't care if their arguments win or not.

I'd note that I've been following the Official Ideology by characterizing the compulsion to tidy up ideas as "diligence". Engaging in compulsive activity is not diligence. The road to recovery is long for Ideaholics.

I'm pretty new to this although I've read Kurzweil's book and Bostrom's Superintelligence, and a couple of years worth of mostly lurking on LW, so if there's if there's a shitload of thinking about this I hope to be corrected civilly

If friendly AI is to be not just a substitute for but our guardian against unfriendly AI, won't we end up thinking of all sorts of unfriendly AI tactics, and putting them into the friendly AI so it can anticipate and thwart them? If so, is there any chance of self-modification in the friendly AI turning all that against us? Ultimately, we'd count on the friendly AI itself trying to imagine and develop countermeasures against unfriendly AI tactics that are beyond our imagination, but then same problem maybe.

I've been pondering for some time, especially prompted by the book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram, how one might distinguish qualities of possible knowledge that make them more or less likely to be of general benefit to humankind. Conflict knowledge seems to have a general problem. It is often developed under the optimistic assumption that it will give "us" who are well-intentioned the ability to make everybody else behave -- or what is close to the same thing, it is developed under existential threat such that it is difficult to think a few years out -- we need it or the evil ones will annihilate us. Hence the US and the atom bomb from 1945-49. Note that this kind of situation also motivates some (who have anticipated where I'm going) to insist "We have this advantage today -- we probably won't have it a few years from now -- lets maximize our advantage while we have it (i.e. bomb the hell out of the USSR in 1946).

Another kind of knowledge might be called value-added knowledge -- knowledge that disproves assumptions about economics being a zero-sum game. Better agriculture, house construction, health measures ... One can always come up with counterexamples and some are quite non-trivial -- the Internet facilitates formation of terrorist groups and other "echo chambers" of people with destructive or somehow non-benign belief systems. Maybe indeed media development falls in some middle-ground between value-added and conflict-oriented knowledge. Almost anything that can be considered "beneficial to humankind" might just advantage one supremely evil person, but I still think we can meaningfully speak of its general tendency to be beneficial, while the tendency of conflict-knowledge seems mostly in the long run to be neutral at best

Boyd, while developing a radically new philosophy of war-fighting got few rewards in the way of promotion and he was always embattled in the military establishment, but he collected around him a few strong acolytes, and did really if inadequately affect the design of fighter planes and their tactics, and his thought grew more and more ambitious until they embraced the art of war generally, and Coram strongly suggests he was as the side of the planners of the first Gulf War, and had a huge impact on how that was waged.

Unfortunately, as the book was being written several years later, there was speculation that people like Al Qaeda had incorporated some of the lessons of new warfare doctrines developed by the US.

It is generally problematic to predict where knowledge construction is going -- because by definition we are making predictions about stuff the nature of which we don't understand because it hasn't been thought up yet -- yet it seems we had better try, and Moore's law gives one bit of encouragement. MIRI seems to be in part a huge exercise in this problematic sort of thinking.

If I have anything more than maybe "food for thought", it may be to look for general tendencies (perhaps unprovable tendencies like Moore's law) in the way kinds of knowledge affect conflict.

Does "irregular verb" have some metaphorical connotation I'm not aware of?

Yes.

So you have a criteria for being skeptical of (I won't say "explaining away", which would be presumptuous) my arguments having to do with the style of my argument rather than its content.

No, I am criticising the content of your argument. You are calling for a refusal to engage with arguments you specifically concede are apparently persuasive ("dazzle their fans"), because they might lead to "unproductive avenues of thought", based on an evidence-free assertion that their originators just want to be different. You provide no basis for distinguishing "narcissistic contrarians" from people who sincerely take non-mainstream positions. You do not have special insight into the internal minds of your opponents.

I'm content to engage with Camille Paglia and Nicholas Taleb and conclude they're wrong. I don't need to go further and engage in armchair psychoanalysis of people I've never met.

You seem to follow with 3 likely different interpretations of the same behavior.

The key thing is the pronoun. Nobody thinks of himself as a narcissistic contrarian. They rather think of themselves as a deep and original thinker.

The easiest way to filter out 99 percent of this is to ignore anything that has no impact on your life (ie doesn't pay rent). Most of the people you could be listening to aren't profitable, but also won't lead you astray: you'll just go on the same regardless. In the final percentage point there are still a lot of confusing opinions that various smart people have, in regards to diet, morality, education, exchethera, but at that point I think it's usually more productive to cross reference the specific opinions rather than look at people as contrarians or not. If you can't cross-check a belief either through reference to other sources, or through your own studies or experience, then it probably isn't relevant one way or the other.

Not everything is signaling.

I have a simpler explanation.

Where true data driven testing and validation isn't possible, which coincidentally involves most of the theories we get all excited and huffy about, theories will suck.

A "Narcissistic Contrarian" is just someone who can see that your theory sucks too.

In the realm of non testable theories, theories will be generated as responses to other theories. The more intellectually compulsive you are, the more you are driven to follow that thread of criticism, and in the limit you won't stop until you can no longer find the error in the thread, whether yourself, or in a valid critique by others. The more obscure the theory, the less it has been subjected to criticism, and the harder to find a valid critique.

Honest, intelligent, diligent people who compulsively care about the truth will stop at some personal tweak to obscure theories lacking widespread criticism, not because they're trying to "create an identity", but because that is where the trail has grown cold.

With less diligence, you simply stop when you cease interacting with people who can beat your kung fu. Your position is no longer problematic at that point. The easiest way is to live in a monoculture.

People who live in monocultures stop earlier. Those who don't live in a monoculture will have influences from the monocultures, and "combine positions not normally met in the same person."

Some people are just intellectually compulsive, and don't spend their days saying or doing things primarily to present an image to others. No doubt that attitude is hard for those who do to comprehend, just as it is difficult for those who don't to get their head around the attitude of those who do.

Self-identified contrarians are best ignored. Those labeled "contrarian" by outsiders might be worth paying more attention to.